Erstwhile roomie and economist extraordinaire Glen Whitman wonders why the political parties don’t give extra weight to delegates from swing states and less to those, like California, that are all-but-guaranteed to go Democratic in November regardless of the nominee. Glen considers the obvious answer, then rejects it: One answer is that it would seem undemocratic. […]

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If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have sworn up and down that I got into Amon Tobin way back in high school, on the strength of his album Supermodified. I just noticed that Supermodified was released in 2000, when I was already a couple years in at NYU. Go figure. Now I’m trying to […]

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“Today’s Chris Muir cartoon is a must-read.”

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J.P. Freire zooms in on a point that was presumably supposed to be central to the New York Times‘ big McCain story, but has been largely neglected: The NRA and the ACLU both can’t buy ad time in the days before an election because doing so, by virtue of the ethical senator’s own philosophy, is […]

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A couple weeks back, I returned to my old alma mater to serve as a judge at the school’s annual parliamentary debate tournament. As invariably happens at these events, I spent a fair amount of time waxing nostalgic with other former-debaters (or “dinos”) who were on the circuit when I was. (Fun factoid: The team […]

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This post at Unclutterer rings true: Often imposing certain kinds of limits on yourself as a writer—practical, technological limitations on the act of writing, rather than stylistic or substantive limits on content, though there’s something to be said for that as well—can be enormously helpful. The post highlights a handy looking writing tool whose primary […]

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The Heritage Foundation’s warrantless wiretap clock lets you know precisely how long scary terrorists have been celebrating the president’s inability to eavesdrop on Americans’ international communications at whim: Update: As a commenter notes, the clock misidentifies the last unit in their counter as “milliseconds.” I used to jokingly say of people I regarded as especially […]

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I’ve got what I think is the first interview with Lawrence Lessig about his potential Congressional campaign at Ars Technica. Update: Whoops, not quite: Sam Gustin at Portfolio beat me to the punch by a few hours.

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Randy Barnett writes at Cato Unbound: In his reply to my post, Tony repeats a common mischaracterization of Nozick’s argument. In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick made no prediction about the emergence of a dominant protection agency. Nor did he describe a mechanism for that emergence. Rather, his argument was that a dominant protection agency […]

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Mike Doughty‘s new album? Solid, of course. Samples here.

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